by John Varley
Alicia smiled at the sound. Whatever gets you off, I guess.
“I FIGURE THEY must be getting pretty desperate to start checking out old UFO reports, don’t you?” Dak asked us all.
“Of course, there’s the other possibility,” I said. “That they’re on to us, and closing in for the… kill? Arrest?”
“Always the bright side, huh, Manny?” Travis laughed. He still looked rough. It had taken quite a while to get his system back under control and he was sipping his raspberry iced tea very carefully. “Nothing we can do about it either way. Might as well operate as if they’re following a cold, cold trail, looking for a revolutionary new technology [250] in the backyard of a Jesus nut or a pathetic drunk. Checking out leads like that, they got to be desperate. Right?”
We decided to leave it at that, but none of us got much sleep that night.
23
* * *
NORMAL SPACECRAFT DON’T have anything you could really call a keel. Our spacecraft did, in a way. Right from the initial acceptance design we’d known the upper part and the lower part would be joined at a structural member that had to be a certain size and shape to hold the seven upended tank cars above it. It was to be a circular girder; circumference of that circle was twenty times pi, sixty-two feet and almost ten inches.
This is a pretty big circle, and it had to be very strong. It had to bear the considerable tonnage of the rest of the ship sitting on it, and also the high temperatures associated with firing the engines. As such, it was to be built from the highest-quality aircraft-grade titanium alloy.
Two days before FBI Sunday we got permission from Travis to begin work on the supporting structure and the thrust ring itself. We made the supports from ordinary scaffolding. Then we laid out the diameter of the ring and began learning how to build things out of the super-high-grade steel. Parts were welded, parts were drilled and bolted.
The welding on Red Thunder’s cradle was particularly fussy because of the exotic material we were using. Caleb couldn’t trust anyone but himself for most of the work, so Travis and Jubal and Dak and I were [252] sometimes welder’s helpers, and sometimes just in the way. More often we were relegated to the job of preparing the structural members to Caleb’s exacting specs before he did the final assembly. I lost count of how many tons of steel we had to throw away and begin again. Every weld was critical. Every weld could become the source of a potentially fatal air leak or structural collapse.
Just because we were little or no help on the critical cradle construction didn’t mean Dak and I didn’t get plenty of welding done. We had enough to occupy us preparing the tanks for the final assembly. We cut the tops off all of them and welded hefty flanges in place top and bottom. When they were all standing upright on the cradle, we’d lower materials in from the top, building decks and ladders and installing the larger, heavier components from the bottom up. Five of the outside tanks would connect with the central tank at about the midpoint, where the tank caps had been. Each connector had to be fitted with a round airtight hatch, so if we lost pressure in one of the outer tanks we could close and dog that hatch and still be in business. Three feet was big enough to let any of us pass through, even Jubal, but we intended to spend most of our waking hours in the central tank with all hatches sealed.
Naturally Caleb had to pass on all our work, adding to his already impossible workload, but it never seemed to bother him. He seemed tireless. “Working offshore rigs is a bunch worse than this,” he’d laugh, when we asked him. I’m proud to say that only twice did he have to make us do a job over. We were learning fast.
There were a thousand things needing to be done, ten thousand pieces all needing to come together in the correct sequence… well, I’d rather have tried to walk to Mars than handle Kelly’s job.
She had endless lists, endless schedules. Before we could tighten a nut or grind a pipe fitting we had to check with her to see if we were out of sequence. Any time of the day we might look up to find her standing there with her electronic clipboard, asking us to clarify this or that system, what do we have to do first, what do we have to do second, and third, and fourth, and nine-hundred-and-fifty-ninth. The next day a new set of printouts would be added to the growing folders of work [253] assignments we all were carrying around, meticulously ticking off each item as it was done, then handing the completed forms to Kelly so she could mark them done in her computer files.
This in addition to compiling and writing the “owner’s manual” for Red Thunder, the specs of every piece of equipment in her, the proper way to troubleshoot a fan or a water pump or a Sears Kenmore freezer, the preflight checklists for each crew member.
This in addition to keeping the books straight and paying all the bills.
This in addition to helping Alicia with her homework every night. And in addition to massaging my shoulders at the end of a day of welding and heavy lifting, before we both fell into bed too exhausted to make love. Some nights, anyway. I began to think seriously about asking her to marry me. If I came back alive, anyway…
MORNINGS, DAK WORKED with me in the warehouse. In the afternoons he left to join his father at the garage, where they were working on our Mars surface transportation vehicle. They were being very tight-lipped about it, not showing the plans to anyone, not allowing anyone to have a look at the work in progress. Not even billing the Red Thunder Corporation for parts, much less labor.
“It’ll be my contribution to the effort,” Sam had said. “It works, or it doesn’t work. We’ll know in a month.” Travis hadn’t objected, glad to have one less piece of the puzzle to worry about. We didn’t have to have a surface transport at all, but it would be kind of a downer to get there and then be limited to trips within a mile of the ship. So we had set aside one tank to carry it, and Dak had showed us what needed to be done to the tank to accommodate the vehicle. It would be the only tank not accessible from the interior of the ship, which meant one less hatch seal to potentially go bad.
Alicia spent all day in her EMT classes. In the evenings she joined Dak and Sam and came with them to the warehouse, where Dak and Kelly, sometimes both, helped her with her homework. Dak reported she was tops in her class, something that made Alicia fairly glow with pride. She had found her life’s work, no question.
[254] I was in charge of product testing. I did that in my vast amounts of spare time, five minutes here, ten minutes there. Even Mom and Aunt Maria and Grace got into the act on product testing, coming over one at a time to help me be sure that every seal, every bolt, every thingamajig and doodad in the whole huge stockpile of building materials and store-bought assemblies was up to the task for which it was intended.
Back in the 1950s a test on living in an enclosed environment had ended early because the floor covering, some sort of linoleum, turned out to be outgassing some really toxic stuff and everybody in the experiment got sick. We would have scrubbers to remove both carbon dioxide and most contaminants that might show up in our air, and detectors for carbon monoxide and a wide range of other poisons. But it was best if we eliminated all those potential problems on the ground.
Luckily for us, NASA had already tested a vast number of substances to assess their suitability for use in launch vehicles and space stations. So 99 percent of the stuff we used was precertified. Again, as in so many things, if that work hadn’t already been done there was no way we could have met our deadline.
But there were a few items here and there that had never been scrutinized, and if we absolutely had to have them, we tested them ourselves in a small sealed chamber.
That was one kind of testing. We spent far more time and effort seeing if this or that could stand up to heat, cold, and vacuum.
Take automobile tires.
“Tires?” I asked Dak, thinking he was kidding.
“Yeah, tires, man. Just your ordinary synthetic rubber steel-belted radials. I want to see how they stand up to cold, and vacuum.”
I knew Dak wouldn’t waste my time, and I knew he pro
bably wouldn’t answer too many questions, so the next day we had a top-of-the-line Goodyear tire delivered.
Our vacuum-testing chamber now had a tank of liquid nitrogen, three hundred and some degrees below zero, and a pump to move the supercold stuff through a grid of pipes inside the tank. We had powerful radiant heaters for testing the other extreme.
[255] We put the tire in the chamber and cooled it down to 150 below. Through the little Plexiglas window it looked okay.
“Take her down to one eighty, one ninety or so,” Dak said, so I did. We left it that way for twelve hours, then pumped out all the air for another twelve, and turned on the heater to about 150 Fahrenheit.
When we opened the chamber Dak picked the tire up in a padded glove… and chunks of hard rubber just peeled away from the tire. Dak didn’t say anything, just carried the tire to the trash Dumpster and tossed it in.
He frowned for two days after that. I began to think that expression would imprint permanently on his face. A couple times he shouted at me for nothing much, which was not like Dak at all. Then on the third day he came in with a big smile on his face.
“Something?” I asked him.
“You’ll see, a few more weeks,” he said, so I left it at that.
The next day sixteen king-sized pink Wal-Mart electric blankets were delivered to the warehouse. The next morning they were gone. Dak had taken them to the garage.
Problem solved, I figured, and turned to other things.
AND ON THE seventh day we rested… long enough to hold the weekly meeting, and for Kelly to tell us we were five days behind schedule. “The cradle is proving to be a lot more difficult to build than we’d planned,” Kelly said.
“Sorry, Kelly,” Caleb said. “If I’d been around for the early planning I’d of told you it was gonna take a bit longer than that.”
“How many more days you figure you’ll need?”
“Another week.”
Kelly began tapping on the screen of her clipboard.
“There are a few items here and there that I can move up. But in about four days there’s not going to be much for the rest of us to do until we get the upper stage in place.”
“There’s still the matter of the space suits,” Travis said.
“I’ve trusted you on that one,” Kelly said. “If you tell me it’s going [256] to take two weeks to make them, we might as well all relax, because the race to Mars is over.”
“I’ll need three, four days, tops,” Travis said. “I have to take a trip. Now might be the best time to take it, if Dak and Manny can handle the metal fabrication work alone, under Caleb’s orders, of course.”
“I can help, too,” Kelly pointed out.
“Sure,” Caleb said. “If I can pull Dak off the rover project four or five days, have him working full-time out here, then with Kelly… then I don’t figure we’d get ’er done any faster with or without you, Trav.”
“I can do that,” Dak said, but he didn’t look happy.
“What if I helped out?” Alicia said.
“No,” Kelly and Travis said at once. Kelly gestured for Travis to go on.
“You getting an EMT rating is one of the necessary factors made me agree to get involved at all. We’ve got to have somebody aboard who can handle a bigger medical problem than a hangnail, which is about all I’m qualified to do.”
“You make me nervous, Travis,” Alicia said. “If you figure I’ll be able to do a heart transplant when I’m done, you’re wrong. Why not take a doctor along?”
“I considered it,” Travis admitted. “I expect you to be able to treat most types of trauma, from a skinned knee to third-degree burns to sawing off a leg. What we’re going to have to deal with, if we have anything at all, is physical injury, pretty much like a bad car wreck. If there’s any hip bones that need to be rebuilt, or plastic surgery, or skin transplants, the patient will have to wait till we get back to Earth. I just want you to have a good shot at keeping trauma victims alive for a three-day ambulance ride.”
“I guess I can handle that,” Alicia sighed.
“You still making that list of stuff?” Dak asked her. Alicia dug in the pocket of her jeans and came up with a rumpled piece of paper which she passed over to Kelly.
“I’ve bought a lot of stuff already,” Kelly said, “We’re going to have a well-equipped infirmary for diagnosis and treatment. We’ve already [257] got just about all the instruments, from a sphygmomanometer to a little rubber hammer.”
“A spigomo…” Jubal looked delighted. A new long word!
“Measures your blood pressure,” Alicia told him.
“I won’t buy plasma and whole blood until we’re ready to leave,” Kelly said. “I’ve got a list of drugs, and only about half can be bought over the counter.”
“I can probably handle that,” Salty said. We all looked at him. Salty was a man of few words, he seldom had anything to say at the Sunday meetings. “I know somebody in Mexico. He can buy most of them over the counter down there, and anything he can’t buy legally, well…”
The obvious question hung in the air, but nobody asked it. His business, I figured.
Salty shrugged, and answered it anyway.
“He’s my connection. I’m not a user, what I buy from him is marijuana, sometimes codeine and morphine. My wife’s got rheumatoid arthritis, and the weed is the best thing she’s found for the day-to-day pain. On her worst days she takes the pills.”
It was clear that Caleb and Grace had known this, but Travis and Jubal looked shocked. Jubal looked ready to cry.
“It’s fairly well under control, don’t worry,” Salty said. “The doctors kept undermedicating her, so we took things into our own hands.”
“Naturally.”
“Sure thing.”
“Sorry to hear it, Salty.”
We all offered sympathy and Salty looked uncomfortable, so Alicia brought us back to the subject.
“Morphine’s on my list,” she said.
“I’ll get it for you.”
There were a few more items of business, dealt with in about half an hour. Then, I was ready to head back to the warehouse, but Travis insisted we go out on the lake and fish for a while. “And there will be no talking the project,” he declared.
It was hard to do that for the first hour. But then I landed a big bass, and took the fishing seriously for the next several hours.
[258] Travis was right, I think. You have to take a break every now and then. But when we got back we all went to work with even more determination.
That night Kelly told me where Travis was going.
“I just booked him Daytona, Atlanta, Moscow, Star City, and back,” she said.
“Star City? Star City?” I have to admit, the Russians’ name for their main space base beat the heck out of our old Cape Canaveral. I sure would have loved to go see for myself. “Maybe I could go along, help him carry his bags.”
“Want me to book you?”
“First class, or tourist?”
“First class, naturally. But he’s paying for the ticket himself. ‘This is a below-the-line cost,’ is what he said. It’s what they say in Hollywood for items not on the regular budget. Like the star’s thirty-million-dollar salary.”
“What do you figure he’s gonna do in Russia?”
“Well, I’ve had a few hours to think it over. Unless he’s selling us out to the dirty Tsarist Russkis, he knows where he can get a deal on some used space suits.”
“Huh!” I was remembering my earlier thought, that there was no thrift store where you could pick up half a dozen used space suits. But there was, of course. Ever since the collapse of Communism, Russia had been one big thrift store, selling out to the bare walls. Crazy Boris Says, “Everything Must Go!” Spacesuits ought to be easy enough to find over there, with Travis’s connections.
WHEN KELLY WAS notified about Travis’s return flight, we flipped coins and I got to be the one who drove the U-Haul to Atlanta to pick him up. It rained all the way t
here and back, but I didn’t mind. It was nice to get out on the highway for a day.
Travis was waiting at a freight terminal with ten wooden crates covered with stenciled Russian instructions and warnings. Five of them were four-foot cubes, but the other five were pretty much the size and [259] shape of coffins. I asked him how the trip was. He seemed tired, but too wired to relax much.
“Mostly flying,” he said. “I don’t know if I’d a made it back in tourist class. I’m not as young as I was. I won’t lie to you, Manny, without the Antabuse I don’t know if I’d a made it. Free drinks all the way there and back. And everywhere you go, it’s ‘Let’s drink to this!’ and ‘Let’s drink to that!’ ” But then he grinned at me. “But I did it, boy-o. Clean and sober, there and back.”
“Congratulations. We’re all proud of you.”
I figured he had more to talk about than the drinking, but he wasn’t through yet.
“Over there, I’m still something of a hero, Manny. Not like here, where I’m washed up and most of my old friends have left. But the Russians… there was a Russian aboard that flight I had to set down in Africa, and they’ve never forgotten. That I was drunk doesn’t matter. In fact, there’s something in the Russian soul that makes them respect me more because I was drunk when I did it.
“Anyway, I got friends over there, friends I never got a chance to alienate. All it takes is a little cash to grease the wheels, then a little more for whatever it is you’re buying… and pretty soon you’ve got what you want, at a tenth of the cost.”
“So those are suits in the boxes?”
“You bet.”
“Why ten boxes?”
“Space suits ain’t like T-shirts. You need a few specialized tools. The helmets and backpacks are in the other boxes, too.” He looked out the window and shivered.